The present disclosure relates generally to information management and, in particular, to methods, systems, and computer program products for implementing data asset management activities for an enterprise.
Small and medium businesses are now facing the same challenges of large enterprises with the explosion of data (structured, partially structured, and unstructured), globalization, outsourcing and rapid resource turnover rates, managing data access in an ever changing environment of legal and corporate compliance issues, combined with the ongoing struggle to make operations more efficient through consolidation.
Few businesses have a full accounting of the information technology (IT) assets that support their processes. This may inhibit their ability to develop a roadmap for infrastructure and process simplification. In an environment where acquisitions are commonplace and corporations are routinely moving to outsourcing models for IT infrastructure and manufacturing, the problem of data movement and persistence of duplicate data within the enterprise is a growing challenge which, if unchecked, may have an immediate cost to their IT budgets and erode their ability to be agile in changing their processes to meet business needs.
Corporations also have long promoted the notion of division, brand, geography, etc., competition within medium to large enterprises which has bred a culture of allowing ad hoc access to information where the data would be captured from the corporate sources and re-purposed for establishing metrics for performance analysis, forecasting, etc. This ad hoc pattern and the resulting data proliferation may diminish an enterprise's ability to be agile when changes are needed. As a result, the enterprise may not know what effect the retirement of an asset or the centralization of an IT asset will have on the overall business. Though ad hoc users are generally given an approved authority for their usage of an information domain, the extraction of information from enterprise sources and the persisting and re-purposing of the information domains, combined with the addition of other information domains, may have a negative impact to the business, particularly from a compliance perspective and may further distract businesses with multiple reporting and measurement processes and multiple versions of the “truth” for metrics.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to deliver proactive discovery of data proliferation and a system for managing this information.